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Monday, June 27, 2016

Xen 4.7.0 Open Source Virtual Machine released

Xen 4.7.0 recently released, is a completely free and open source virtual machine monitor for x86 computer platforms that has been designed from the ground up to support execution of multiple guest operating systems in isolated environments on a single machine. It is one of the most powerful virtual machine solutions for Linux, UNIX and POSIX OSes.

Xen Project software is an open source virtualization platform licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed from the start for cloud computing, the Project has more than a decade of development and is being used by more than 10 million users. A Project at The Linux Foundation, the Xen Project community is focused on advancing virtualization in a number of different commercial and open source applications including server virtualization, Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), desktop virtualization, security applications, embedded and hardware appliances. It counts many industry and open source community leaders among its members including: Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, AMD, ARM, Bromium, Cavium, Citrix, Huawei, Intel, NetApp, Oracle, Rackspace, and Verizon Terremark.

Xen 4.7.0 Changelog

Usability Improvements: In Xen 4.7, a new XL command line interface to manage PVUSB devices has been introduced to manage PVUSB devices for PV guests. The new XL commands also enables hot-plugging of USB devices as well as QEMU disk backends, such as drbd, iscsi, and more in HVM guests. This new feature allows users to add and remove disk backends to virtual machines without the need to reboot the guest. In addition, the soft reset for HVM guests allows for a more graceful shutdown and restart of the HVM guest.

Support for a wider range of workloads and applications: The PV guest limit restriction of 512GB has been removed to allow the creation of huge PV domains in the TB range. TB sized VMs, coupled with Xen Project’s existing support for 512 vCPUs per VM, enable execution of memory and compute intensive workloads, like big data analytics workloads and in-memory databases.

Enhanced Development with ARM: Xen Project now supports booting on hosts that expose ACPI 6.0 (and later) information. The ARM Server Base Boot Requirements (SBBR) stipulate that compliant systems need to express hardware resources with ACPI; thus this support will come in useful for ARM Servers. This effort was carried out by Shannon Zhao of Linaro with minor patches from Julien Grall of ARM.

Additionally, PSCI 1.0 compatibility allows Xen Project software to operate on systems that expose PSCI 1.0 methods. Now, all 1.x versions of PSCI will be compatible with Xen Project software. More information on Power State Co-ordination Interface can be found here. This effort was also carried out by Julien Grall with a patch from Dirk Behme of Bosch.